What We Forget in Excess

The truth is that we waste most of our youth in excessive competitiveness, spinning our wheels, and as adults, we need enough excess to spice things up. Perhaps this is why there are so many great quotes about how youth is wasted on the young. This knucklehead devotion to extreme excess is a more serious matter, and it worsens in time because it becomes habitual—almost like an addiction.

Some corporate types are 99 percent self, 1 percent social. They will never be promoted into the future. They feel they are the future, however small their actual dungeon and no matter how far afield their best projects. In fact, they call others socialists if they speak about having obligations larger than to their own and their firm’s tribe.